1/5/14

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Charles Sanders Peirce Were Very Similar

Peirce seems to me similar to Bonhoeffer, suspended between an untenable trinitarian orthodoxy weighted with the baggage of 2000 years and a future in which triadic awareness past nominalism would yield up the implicit rewards presaged in his articulation of pragmaticism. My recurrent suggestion that this will require adherence to an actual format for conscious thinking is not, I think, inconsistent with Peirce's own suggestions that ordinary human beings have natural philosophical capacities. Nor is the insistence that ethics and aesthetics be included in the root triad for such thinking entirely random. Ethics via Aristotle was incapable of moving beyond a binary iteration, enabling the worst conflicts. 



Aesthetics was provincialized as an adjunct to the late Dr. Danto's art world. There are all manner of antecedents that are consistent with the universalism that can be attributed to both Peirce and Bonhoeffer. In my view, American unversalism suffered when it followed the vapid leadership of Hosea Ballou and rejected the radical thinking of early universalists like James Relly and John Murray. These men attacked the core trinitarian concept without denying the persistence of sin. Perhaps the best way to express where Peirce and Bonhoeffer came down is to say that both were willing to insist that the world heed the demands inherent in the term agape. And both were aware of the venal nature of humankind but nonetheless committed to continuiity and progress. 

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